Trump Fires Rally Organizer for Not Making Rally Big Enough

For all his impulsivity, Donald Trump has been oddly hesitant to fire even his most disliked subordinates. It took months of browbeating and backbiting in the press before Sean Spicer and Reince Priebus exited the White House, and even then, they only departed when Trump brought in a new communications director and a new chief of staff to push them out the door. (The new chief of staff, John Kelly, subsequently fired the new communications director, Anthony Scaramucci, too.) Steve Bannon was on the outs for nearly the entire length of his West Wing tenure, but didn’t resign until mid-August. Sebastian Gorka’s ouster last Friday was long overdue.

The latest victim of the White House’s game of musical chairs, however, was terminated immediately, and with extreme prejudice, for the gravest sin of all: allegedly messing up one of the president’s beloved campaign rallies.

Bloomberg reports that after coming to Phoenix last week and seeing a less-than-full room upon his arrival, Trump swiftly fired his longtime rally organizer and former advance director, George Gigicos, for not filling the event venue. Even though the room eventually filled before Trump came on stage—a Phoenix official estimated the crowd to be 10,000 strong, a rather midsize rally by Trump standards—the president was fuming. Afterward, he dispatched his longtime bodyguard, Keith Schiller—the same man he sent to fire James Comey—to tell Gigicos that he would never manage a Trump rally again.

It’s not the first time that Trump has lashed out at Gigicos if a rally was less than perfect. At one rally in January 2016, he publicly berated his aide when his microphone had problems, yelling “The stupid mic keeps popping! Do you hear that, George? Don’t pay them! Don’t pay them!” Still, he continued to employ Gigicos, hiring him briefly as his advance director at the White House, and then continuing to work with him to set up rallies even after he left for the Republican National Committee. But it seemed like the Phoenix rally—which came at the apex of the media firestorm over Charlottesville—was the last straw. Nevertheless, he persisted in spinning the rally as a good thing. “You saw the massive crowd we had,” Trump bragged this week during a press conference, standing next to Finland’s President Sauli Niinisto.

Unscripted rallies are one of the few things Trump clearly enjoys about his political life—a fact his advisers have reportedly used as an incentive to keep him presidential. Kellyanne Conway famously told New York magazine that during the campaign’s lowest days, she allowed him to hold more rallies in order to improve his morale. As president, Trump has already held eight rallies—an unusual practice for a sitting president not in a campaign year, but a welcome distraction from the complexities and frustrations of governance. Gigicos’s failure to create a comforting environment for the president’s public therapy session, then, was the ultimate betrayal. Trump takes no joy from venting in a half-empty room.